Emma_Goldman

If you read the literature analysing historic nuclear costs around the world, this just isn't true. Nuclear reactors are complex 'mega-projects' requiring coordination across a vast number of actors, specialist work under the constraints of a construction sites, and which - because of lower numbers of reactors, changing and adapted design, diffuse consortia - have failed to push down costs through learning-by-doing. A study just over a decade ago found that ~98% of nuclear projects involve schedule overruns. Because nuclear projects involve extreme capital costs, this means: (i) vast sums have to be paid in interest over the build time; (ii) states/taxpayers/consumers usually bear some of the risk.

Compare a nuclear project to a solar panel. Solar is cheap, simple, commoditised, flexible, and is riding on almost miraculous learning curves. If dispatchable energy can be solved, beyond just gas/coal plants, ideally with long-duration storage based on the conversion of electricity, then this is going to be an infinitely better option. It's also just not clear what role nuclear plants have given that renewables need highly dispatchable power to ramp up and down according to their variable output, not baseload nuclear power.

Interesting, the question for me is why eat ultra-processed meat simulacra, that don't taste particularly nice, like impossible and beyond burgers? It is possible to home cook far healthier and more delicious veggie burgers with seitan, mushrooms, lentils, etcetera. Ultimately, this whole meat substitute market is targeting a niche that doesn't exist at anything like the scale envisioned, because it competes with low cost meat on the one hand and low cost plant-based burgers on the other, and is worse than both on all relevant metrics.

It's not. This whole discussion is confused because it's based on a misunderstanding of how electricity markets work. When states charge a captive customer base whatever nuclear project costs turn out to be, profitability is not a meaningful measure of economic attractiveness. Levelised cost of energy, or system cost of energy, under different regulatory and market regimes, is the relevant benchmark.

Australia and Canada are top producers of uranium ore, and uranium ore is a small fraction of total lifecycle costs. Given a ~2 year refuelling cycle and the possibility of stockpiling uranium, this is very far from an interruption to oil and gas flows - which you need a continuous supply of. Security isn't just a function of autarkic raw material supplies.

OK, fair enough, Brexit generated a lot of political noise and was a bureaucratic headache. Not really the same thing as Trump's America though.

You write as if you have confabulated yourself into being Europe's official spokesperson. This is all a bit high-handed.

I'm not really sure how you are comparing Trump's US - responsible for pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, tearing up the Iranian nuclear deal and then starting a war to reimpose it that has created a global energy crisis, kidnapping Maduro and threatening to invade Greenland, beginning a global trade war, giving up on climate mitigation, nuclear treaties and AI safety - with the UK over the same period.

Liz Truss is not really Trump's equivalent. She achieved exactly nothing in the UK, let alone the world, in her few weeks in office. It's also worth pointing out she didn't win a general election: she became PM via the Conservative Party's internal selection process.

There's plenty of data on the clustering of high-functioning autistic workers in engineering and computer science, and the massively disproportionate share of autistic children with fathers and grandfathers in those fields. I work across technical and non-technical academic fields and the difference is quite obvious. It also follows naturally from some of the common presentations of autism, e.g., the high co-occurrence of dyslexia.

The strong affinity between autism and intelligence seems strongest in technical fields, and engineering and computer science in particular. Autism does not seem to be over-represented to anywhere near the same degree in many other domains that are full of intelligent people.

It's true that all else being equal new power demand lowers the fixed cost per unit of marginal energy generated. But if the data centre requires new grid and storage capacity to handle its load and those fixed costs are charged to the entire electricity consumer base, there is a trade-off.

Also, all else is not equal because the UK is already grasping towards a stretch target of a >95% low-carbon power system by 2030 which has over-loaded supply chains, sacrificed generation cost to speed, and created a queue to connect to the grid that outpaces the annual rate of connections by over an order of magnitude. Adding huge blocks of new incremental demand to the system is quite a challenge, in this context.

Why? Books are to be read, annotated, lived with and lent out, not treated as precious objects in a way that is completely orthogonal to their use-value.

Is cacao production unsustainable? It seems the problem is the oligopolistic and exploitative price setting architecture for cacao. Pay farmers more, and supply will increase.

One of the alt-chocolate alternatives mentioned here involve palm oil, one of the most environmentally destructive ingredients on the planet.

I don't think beyond meat is an example to follow. It is ultra-processed fake food ruinous of health, and rightly - at least in the UK - now has an aura of ill-health surrounding it. Better to just make yourself a burger with healthy whole foods, like lentils, mushrooms, chickpeas.

Lead and cadmium can stay in the body for decades, so it is a cumulative rather than an acute problem, I think.

This is the main reason I don't frequently eat chocolate anymore. Dark chocolate is both the tastiest and lowest-sugar chocolate, but its cacao-intensity increases your intake of metals.

If I recall correctly, however, the origin of the cacao makes some difference. Cacao from West Africa and Asia has a lot less lead and cadmium than from South America. Still, I think little chocolate, wherever it's from, is metal-free.

I use the app screenzen. It rations distracting apps and retrains you to use your phone as a functional device again. I now only use my phone for messaging, emails, maps and spotify, but can still access Chrome when I need. A perfect balance.

It's reasoned conjecture on an internet message board. Yes, it is over-stated. But if one treats quality of diet as one variable among many in cognitive capacity, which is the only sane approach, then trying to match the diet of a population to trendlines in society-wide cognitive performance is not going to tell you anything.

Why isn't that the current CfD / RAB models?

They approach environmental reporting like a campaign organisation, it's just not serious. Politically, I will never forgive the Guardian for the mendacious editorial campaign they waged against the Corbyn project. In general, the Guardian leads with cultural issues geared towards the liberal professional managerial class, which only compounds the logic and superficiality of its clickbait business model. It is incredibly hard to learn anything by reading the Guardian. This quote from the nymag piece is telling: “The reason I think that it works for us is we cover so much breaking news and it drives a lot of traffic, and we have the scale to make it work,” Reed said. “Even if we only monetize one percent, it’s still a lot.”

As a long-standing Guardian reader, I couldn't disagree more. It might be financially solvent, but the business model of the paper under the leadership of Katherine Viner has shifted to high throughput, low quality content vying for clicks in the attention economy. They have gone all-in on volume.

Compare that to the Financial Times, which has a low throughput of very high quality content, enabled by a discerning and high paying subscriber base. I read the Guardian for the lifestyle / cooking sections these days, but the FT is an incomparably better and more serious publication, whatever your politics (mine are the diametric opposite of the financial class).

Wikipedia is fairly reliable if our standard isn't a platonic ideal of truth but real-world comparators. Reminds me of Kant's famous line. "From the crooked timber of humankind, nothing entirely straight can be made".

See the Wikipedia page on the subject :)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia

Bizarre confabulation: the text you quote says nothing of the sort. They say the made one site, not to be confused with other, similar sites, and that the idea originates with someone else's tweet. Why jump to negative conclusions when they are sharing their project for the first time?

Ukraine's capital account has to offset its trade account or its currency tanks, and the state is in desperate for revenue, so however regrettable, this looks more like predictable economic arithmetic working itself out than a conspiracy. I don't 'support' it, that's not the point, but the global trade architecture is a brute fact of the conjuncture which give states in Ukraine's extreme situation few options. Again, happy to be told otherwise by anyone with more knowledge of the Ukrainian economy.

I should say, Mark Curtis is a well-known conspiracy-adjacent figure in the UK. His piece cherry picks and distorts the primary sources. He makes mundane civil service work sound far more sinister than it is. Go on the UK project website and read for yourself.

Curtis' version:

"It notes: “Ironically, despite the horrific circumstances in which interventions are being delivered, the operating context has provided a unique opportunity to really demonstrate to the GoU [government of Ukraine] and the Ukrainian population the importance and effectiveness of targeted technical assistance interventions designed to deliver reforms that generate tangible benefits”.

These reforms are also variously described in the UK project documents as “better integration with Euro-Atlantic markets” and “aligning it [Ukraine] more closely with Western markets”."

Original version:

"Whilst Russia’s invasion has had a fundamental impact, the roots of Ukraine’s weak governance and growth stretch back to independence: systemic corruption via oligarchy and economic concentration; inconsistent application of the rule of law and judicial corruption; weak public administration capacity and state capture, and large-scale state involvement in the economy. These were some of the factors driving the need for continuation of the GGF even prior to the invasion.

What has changed over the past year is that the invasion has led to a profound increase in need, coupled with an unsettling of the previous reform-resistant ‘elite bargain’. As such, opportunities exist for serious reform and a healthier long-term political settlement. Some favourable conditions exist such as a (temporary) decline in the political power of the oligarchs , much greater international support for Ukraine, including increased international support for EU candidacy as both an incentive and a structured process for deep-rooted reforms, greater social cohesion, and a resurgence of civil society and civic activism. Most importantly, public support for the state has grown, and in part as a result of the support of GGF-funded and managed interventions.

Ironically, despite the horrific circumstances in which interventions are being delivered, the operating context has provided a unique opportunity to really demonstrate to the GoU and the Ukrainian population the importance and effectiveness of targeted technical assistance interventions designed to deliver reforms that generate tangible benefits. The GGF has seized such opportunities providing valuable support to some hugely important reforms for example: through the TAPAS project IDPs were able to receive status certificates in days instead of weeks, citizens accessed ID cards, passports, birth certificates and tax payer identification numbers online in 18 regions and half a million people, (55% women) from occupied areas and active warzones were able to register their unemployment status and thus receive GoU support. The IFC project has supported Digital Data Corridors that have enabled thousands of Ukrainian refugees in eight countries across Europe to access their credit history. The IFES project resulted in over 3,000 students in 22 universities actively engaging in civic education. Finally, the IDLO project has supported the Higher Council of Justice (HCJ) to resume its work after a two year hiatus, appointing 8 new members in January 2023. "

So, Curtis' killer quote actually referred to helping hundreds of thousands of displaced or embattled Ukrainians access their passports and birth certificates so that they could claim state benefits and asylum abroad.

Less a scandal than the predictable outcome of a massive wartime trade account deficit, and faltering state revenues, that have to be made up via the sale of Ukrainian assets in the capital account paying out to the state? I am a socialist, but Ukraine is in a war of survival under extreme economic duress, and could lose US backing under Trump. It has to do whatever is necessary at this point. Not surprising it would favour the UK given that it's one of its leading geopolitical backers and the City of London. Happy to be told otherwise if anyone knows more about the Ukrainian economy and any alternative lifelines open to it.

It's also the name of the most successful left-wing press in the English-speaking world:

https://www.versobooks.com

The question of Palestine's admissibility to ICC proceedings was subject to a sophisticated legal review years ago, in relation to a former case.

The gist of the argument can be gleaned from its sub-headings:

Palestine is a State for the purposes of the Statute under relevant principles and rules of international law...... 25

C.1. The Montevideo criteria have been less restrictively applied in certain cases........ 25

C.2. It is appropriate to apply the Montevideo criteria less restrictively to Palestine, for the purposes of the Rome Statute ..... 29

C.2.a. The Palestinian people have a right to self-determination and it has been recognised that this implies a right to an independent and sovereign State of Palestine... 30

C.2.b. The exercise of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination is being obstructed by practices contrary to international law................... 32

C.2.c. Palestine has been recognised by a significant number of States.............. 34

C.2.d. No other State has sovereignty over the Occupied Palestinian Territory............ 35

C.2.e. Palestine’s status as a State Party must be given effect........ 36

C.2.f. The Prosecution’s alternative position is consistent with international law ........ 39

C.2.g. Participants’ arguments regarding a possible referral by the Security Council are unclear.......... 40

D. The Oslo Accords do not Bar the Exercise of the Court’s Jurisdiction........ 40

D.1. The Oslo Accords regulated a gradual transfer of power to the Palestinian Authority over most of the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem) and Gaza.............. 40

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20230609070357/http://www.icc-cp...

Coincidentally, Josep Borrell, the foreign policy chief of the EU, announced earlier in the month that several of the bloc's member states intend to recognise Palestinian statehood on the 21st of May - today.

See: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/spain-ireland-reco....

I don't think this is right at all, a lot of intellectual forms of 'flow' necessarily involve incessant reflection, often through writing and re-writing, but also through conversation with self and others. Keep in mind that Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, who pioneered the concept of flow, thought of the manipulation of symbols - including in science, philosophy, conversation - as one of its principal domains.

I'm curious if anyone could expand on the numbers here. Global data centres running at max capacity are estimated to require ~45GW of electricity. That's a lot, but not necessarily for the whole world, so it really depends on the rate of growth, and in particular, its national/regional distribution. For reference, demand on the British electricity grid peaked at 37.5GW today:

https://grid.iamkate.com/

Well, that's the point in question. For its critics, the whole enterprise is a misguided sham. See Leif Wenar's stimulating recent piece, 'The Deaths of Effective Altruism', which sees SBF less as aberration, than symptom.

https://www.wired.com/story/deaths-of-effective-altruism/

I think EA was naive from the start, both in its unreflective moral realism, and its reduction of complicated questions of social theory down to back-of-the-envelope utility calculations based on threadbare empirics.

The list of illustrative examples may be misleading you. It is a wide category. Look at the Nova classification, then look at the ingredients list of meat substitutes. There is no debate on this point.

See also:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/feb/12/quorn-r...

Food, and therefore nutrition, is significantly more complicated than a ledger of macronutrients. In this particular case, I was getting at this:

https://www.bmj.com/content/384/bmj-2023-077310